Community Participation

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Our participation in the open source software community is essential to the expertise and professional development of our team. We advance the open source platforms on which we work by contributing our time, code, and knowledge. In return, we stay on the cutting-edge of technology and our work benefits from consistent peer review.

Zivtech is committed to the open source software community at large. Every member of our team spends 20% of their time contributing back to various open source projects. As an office, we encourage our developers and designers to attend, speak, and train at events around the world. We also sponsor and help organize events, including conferences, camps, and community meet-ups. Locally, Zivtech hosts the monthly Philadelphia Area Drupal Meet-up and has helped organize Drupaldelphia, the Philadelphia area Drupal Camp, since 2008.

Our community involvement keeps us on the cutting-edge of technology. It helps us build and maintain working relationships with leading experts and it enables us to submit custom code back to the community for thorough peer review. As a direct result, the sites we build are future-ready. They can be maintained and extended without difficulty, well into the future. This ultimately benefits the clients with whom we work.

Unfortunately for some, it is often after the completion of a project that they discover the pitfalls of working with developers who are not active in the open source community. They find excess code or custom patches. They also find that their developers used modules and techniques that quickly became obsolete. These organizations are forced to hire developers for even basic maintenance. But new developers may be unwilling to work on a site if the code is not standards compliant or the reputation of the previous developer is unknown and the project is a potential quagmire.

At Zivtech, we believe community participation is the strongest sign of developer expertise and, therefore, the most important factor for the long-term success of any open source project. We advise all potential clients to perform proper due diligence. Thankfully, the transparent nature of open source projects makes tracking developers’ contributions straightforward.

Our participation in the open source software community is essential to the expertise and professional development of our team. We advance the open source platforms on which we work by contributing our time, code, and knowledge. In return, we stay on the cutting-edge of technology and our work benefits from consistent peer review.